As a mom and an elementary school teacher, I have watched the movie Finding Nemo more times than I can count. My favorite scene by far is the one where Marlin and Dory catch the East Australian Current (EAC) with Crush the sea turtle and travel rapidly across the ocean in order to get closer to their final destination. In a way, my experiences in the Master of Arts in Educational Technology (MAET) program at Michigan State University (MSU) mirror that same kind of rapid travel from one point to another in my professional life.
I love teaching and learning. I was a good student, enjoyed school and always had something on the side that I was studying for fun - the Space Program, the Civil War, Indian Burial Mounds. Going into education was a natural progression from my personal passions. I was so driven that I had to add an extra semester to my undergraduate program because I did not have enough credits to put myself on the priority list for student teaching. I taught for four years, and then got the itch to go back to school. I started a Master’s program in Curriculum and Instruction with an emphasis on Library Science. I discovered my real passion and transitioned from the classroom to the library where I have been for the past 18 years. During this time, I took a break from formal schooling because of life. I met and married my husband, had two babies, helped my husband through the loss of his parents and dealt with the loss of my own dad. During this same time, I watched my role in the library start to shift from print to technology resources. At that point, it had been fourteen years since I had worked toward a formal degree, my husband had just finished his MBA, and I wanted the philosophical and pedagogical background to support the changes that were occurring in my position. I also wanted to be challenged intellectually. I remembered the MSU program from a keynote I had heard Dr. Punya Mishra give, and jumped on the MAET current to move myself forward in my profession.
My acceptance in the MAET program coincided with some very important changes in my district. First, they hired a new Director of Curriculum and Instruction who has a background in educational technology and maker spaces. Secondly, they changed the position of Assessment Coordinator to Director of Innovation, Assessment and Continuous Improvement, and hired an individual with a background in gaming and personalized learning. These two personnel changes have dramatically impacted teaching and learning in my district, and allowed me to readily change my practice and implement my learning from the program.
This summer the course that is most impacting my professional life is CEP 820: Teaching Students Online. I took this course in the Spring of 2016 at the same time my district was choosing a new Learning Management System (LMS). As I was exploring various LMSs in my class, I was working with a team in my district undergoing the same process. It was fun and exciting to be able to bring learning from both venues back and forth. The experience of having my coursework and my professional life dovetail so perfectly made my learning much deeper than it would have been otherwise. In addition, my classroom learning gave me the background to question some of the original baselines of my district. I argued for easier interface and the importance of embedded communication policies. I am also looking forward to helping teachers develop effective units based on the online teaching and learning principles I experiencesd in this class. As a result of my course, the administrators involved in the process recognized I had a deeper understanding and asked me to become a part of the Oversight Committee guiding the roll out of our new LMS this upcoming year. I am now the only non-administrator who is part of that team discussing timelines, developing professional development, and supporting classroom teachers in the implementation of this new tool across my district. If it weren’t for the learning and experience that I received through this course, I do not know if I would have been able to become part of the leadership of this process for our district. This role represents one of the types of leadership roles I had hoped would become available to me as a result of my experiences in the MAET program.
The class that had probably impacted my overall practice in the most profound way is CEP 811: Adapting Innovative Technology to Education. It is the class that forced me to rethink how I used technology, and how I could support technology in my district. This is the course where I was first introduced to the Maker movement and the idea of school MakerSpaces. I have spent the past year and a half working on administrative support, funding, and building teacher understanding. This fall, I will be opening a MakerSpace in my building. It will start out small as I continue to grow teacher support, but it is a step toward making a change in the learning culture of my building.
CEP 811 also got me thinking about my learning environment and whether or not it supports my vision of learning. I work in a building that was originally intended to be an open concept school. We have 21 classrooms and the library in one large room that we call the Learning Center. While the building was designed using the open concept model, our learning practices have traditionally been those of a slightly modified self-contained classroom. I have a quite large media center located in the center of the classrooms and it is used in a variety of ways from individual student work to professional development classes to all school assemblies. I have modified my space multiple times in the eleven years I have been there, but I am still not entirely happy with the space for a variety of reasons including the fact that I have a large, awkward hard-wired computer lab in the middle of it. One of our activities in class was to redesign our teaching space using a learning theory as the foundation for our change. I used Kolb’s Experiential Learning theory as the basis of my redesign. My blog post detailing the assignment can be found here. My goal was to create an environment that was flexible to allow for continued multi-purpose use, but also supported the use of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), and Personalized Learning as well as allowed for the development of a MakerSpace. When I created the plan, I honestly thought it was an ideal that was unachievable in my building. I am happy to say that over the past year and a half, I have been able to make considerable progress toward the goal of recreating my library to represent this vision. While I still have the hard-wired computer lab for at least another year, I have been able to create more flexible work areas with new mobile furniture, to add three new Chromebook carts to encourage learning beyond the boundaries of a lab and to design a MakerSpace that allows students to learn experientially through planning, failure and redesign. These changes have brought a new level of excitement to my program both for me and my students.
A third way that CEP 811 has changed my professional practice is by introducing me to peer driven professional development through EdCamps. Prior to my experiences in CEP 811, I had never really thought about the rich experiences and skill sets of my fellow educators. I had a Twitter Personal Learning Network (PLN), but those were the “experts” in education. They were not the teacher down the hall. After our mini EdCamp experience, I really understood that each of us is something special, and if we share our knowledge and experience, we will improve the school environment for students. Since this course, I have made it a priority to attend at least one EdCamp annually. My first two EdCamps, I was just a sponge soaking up what the others had to offer. I would participate in conversations and talk about my work, but I was too unsure of myself to offer up session ideas as a leader. I changed that at the last EdCamp I attended. I finally realized I had something to offer as well and proposed a course that was added to the schedule. It does not sound like much, but it was a giant leap for me that would not have happened if I had not had to opportunity to experience this learning format on a smaller scale in my course work. I am even looking at ways to apply the same concept to my work with my fifth grade students to give them the opportunity to shine.
I started this program because I wanted to strengthen my foundational knowledge related to Educational Technology. Courses like CEP 811 and CEP 820 did that for me, but other courses allowed me to take that foundation and really build a personal philosophy for what I am doing. Two courses, CEP 818: Creativity in Teaching and Learning and CEP 815: Technology and Leadership, were really the catalysts for that. CEP 818 introduced me to the things that highly creative people do, but more importantly, it forced me to work outside my comfort zone in order to grow. I wrote poetry. I composed a song, recorded it, and posted it online for people to hear. I learned to search for the unusual amidst the ordinary. What this course did was help me remember that learning is fun and learning deeply about things you are passionate about is the best feeling. It also reminded me to allow students to engage in their passions. As a result of my change in focus, my own students were given opportunities to be creative. My favorite example being a 5th grader's rap of the Dewey Decimal System. CEP 818 allowed me to take that reminder one step further and create my own personal vision of education. This was a crucial step for me. I had been in education for a long time and never really had a personal vision. I could tell you the vision of my program. I could tell you the vision of my school or my district, but I always fell to those rather than having my own viewpoint of what education should be and how to get there. This course forced me to think deeply about my beliefs and confront the conflict that has existed for a while between my personal vision and that of the district in which I work. It also gave me the strength to have a conversation with my principal that directly led to a change in my work environment that will help me reduce that conflict. Through the process of creating and articulating my vision, I feel I have a better ability to create a better educational environment for both me and my students.
Two years. 5 semesters. In that amount of time, I have ridden the current that is the MAET program. It has not been easy, and I have had to make sacrifices. I have written papers at 11:30 at night on the tile floor of a motel bathroom while on vacation. I have had to stay home from family outings in order to finish my homework. I’ve had to figure out how to communicate in real time with people in Michigan, Wisconsin, Alaska and the Middle East at the same time as part of a study group. I would not give up the experience though. I have grown more as an educator in the last 5 semesters than I have in the past 15 years. My learning has allowed me to transition my role from a fixed schedule librarian wondering how to get achieve my potential to a fully embedded technology coach supporting teaching and learning in a way that matches my philosophy. I now have the foundation that I was missing before, but more importantly, I have the passion back in my teaching. I remember why I am here and what I wanted to do with my life. It is now time for me to jump back off the current and into the new roles and responsibilities I have earned as a result of my studies. Whee!
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